Saturday, May 5, 2018

Reflections on "Strong men" (Part 2)

These “strong men” can only hold power because they have
manipulated others, the facts, the agents who distribute the information and
generally painted a picture in which the masses either believe or believe they
are powerless to change.

The emasculation of the masses did not start with trump. Nor will
it be over on his demise. The emasculation of the masses began with the notion
that “father knows best”….back in the dark ages when some chief and tribe both
believed that they had discovered the shortest path to “reconciled power”
within the tribe. And even then, specific traditions limited the purview of
those “chiefs”….Andthere was also the
notion of a God, the Pope, and the ignorance of the masses, enshrined in the
notion that ordinary people could not be trusted to “read” the Bible correctly.
Only the “educated elite” in the Vatican were so enlightened as to be able to with
promulgate the real “truth” of God’s word. And since we absolutely abhor
uncertainty, chaos, and the complexities of ambiguities, we prefer the “order”
imposed by a single voice.

Noel Coward notes: It is discouraging how many people are shocked
by honesty and how few by deceit.

T.S. Eliot reminds us: people cannot tolerate too much truth.*

Of course, truth-telling is a reliable approach to being
marginalized in any organization, family, or government, especially truth
telling that exposes the abuse of power by others. Having held secrets deeply
hidden in my heart and mind, forhalf a century, believing that to expose the
truth would embarrass those who “parented” my sister and me. I now recognize
the futility and the failed responsibility of my silence because the pattern
spilled over into my own marriage. Meagre attempts to open the Pandora’s Box of
the real truth of what was going on inside what was then 104 Gibson not only
were fruitless, but actually back-fired with even more violence, now triggered
by whispered disclosure by letter to distant family members.

Whistle-blowers, we all know, are despised by those in power. They
represent if not the greatest, then certainly one of the most virulent threats
to anyone in power who is abusing that power. Legislation to “protect”
whistle-blowers, too, is so ineffective that it is virtually useless. Any
negative public disclosure of the failings of an organization, or specifically
a leader (one of those strong men) is so abhorrent, especially when one
considers the fragility of the character and the ego’s of such men. Rage,
unfettered rage and revenge are the immediate reactions of “strong men” to the
disclosure of their longest, best-kept and most heinous secrets. Even secrets
that would not impact negatively the personal reputation of a discloser, but
perhaps the honour and public reputation of a family, have to be sealed from
public light, in a repression of the truth that can and does compromise the
secret-bearer as well as the family or organization.

Mental and emotional
health, deeply and inextricably linked even enmeshed with the freedom and
openness to receive and to honour the full truth, especially when it is hard to
digest, is compromised through the rigorous silence that some of us impose on
our family history. “Black” Uncle Tom, the drunk, who is never spoken of by
family rule and tradition, is an example. The unwed teen who had to leave home
to have her baby is just another of the many “secrets” that haunt the streets
and the coffee shops of many towns and cities. The family, or organization,
too, is compromised by the repression of its “darkest” secrets, given the
notion that only the truth can and will ‘set everyone free’. To live under a
cloud, without either acknowledging or opening up and confronting the secrets,
is to render much of what goes on there as a form of play acting.

The church, too, has its own “secrets”…like the many kangaroo
courts that have been summoned, to discipline someone who is challenging the
status quo. While it is no secret that the ecclesial body has adopted both the
administrative hierarchical top-down structure of organization and the
deployment of power, such a structure puts the few at the top, including the
top honcho on a kind of pedestal, a target really, for the critics to focus
their attacks. And having declared itself the “keeper of the morality” of the
culture, (either officially or unconsciously) the church has embraced the
notion of defining sin, and then taken to manufacturing both inadequate
processes and even more suspect decisions as ‘punishment’ or exclusion as its
way of living out a theology of “forgiveness”.

So, within the structure of that culture, it has felt obliged to place
a veil, or perhaps a reredos, on the vaults of its many secrets. Pursuing a
culture in which it expects people to place ultimate confidence and trust, as
does the military, the medical profession, the legal profession, as well as
most governments and bureaucracies, only enhances the potential for
accumulating secrets, which in themselves, might not be all that serious,
nevertheless places those in charge in a position of having to choose between
looking the other way, or taking action that is “decisive” and “strong”. Overlooking,
or preferring to ignore the basic truth of nature that both change and
imperfection are “baked into the cake” of everything human, we have entrapped leadership,
as well as our perception of what passes for acceptable and trustworthy and
integrous, in a vice so narrow and so inflexible, as to seriously impair the
effective, open and honest dynamic of civility, mutual respect and the
potential of readily accessible reformation.

Capital punishment, for example, is demonstrated not to provide a
deterrent for others, and yet, in our unbridled and voracious appetite for
revenge, some 38 American states have re-instituted it in the last decade.
Similarly, “war” on opiods, or illicit street drugs, manifests a wanton
disregard for the conditions in which people are living, that lead them to
medicate their inordinate psychic, emotional and even physical pain. It does,
however, underly, enhance and reproduce a culture so bound up by its own fear of
failure that it falls victim to that very fear, (just another of the many secrets
that we refuse to deal with honestly, openly and moderately).

Another secret that we refuse to discuss is our dependence on hard
power, as the panacea for protecting us from potential “invasion” by a foreign
power. It is a mere shibboleth that no one wins in any military conflict, and
yet, the American budget for the Pentagon consumes by far the largest
percentage of the national budget, while people starve, live on the streets, or
have to choose between needed medications and food or rent. Keeping others in
power, under such specious foundations, only exaggerates a culture of both denial
and self-sabotage.

The denial of human agency in global warming and climate change,
too, is a glaring reality that threatens the survival of the planet and all of
us. And while there are voices crying in the wilderness, and voices taking some
steps to confront our own dependence on fossil fuel, for example, as one of the
more significant contributors to CO2 emissions, we are both slow and reluctant
to be honest and open in our public policy to address the danger. Of course,
there are arguments, in the short term for the preservation of jobs, incomes
and family stability. However, creative approaches to this and many other public
issues, tend to struggle under the weight of opposition from those seeking to
preserve their personal, and their temporary and fleeting grasp of the brass
ring.

Leaders like trump and putin are using the public’s attraction,
even obsession, with stories of trite and tawdry human sex and private money “dirt”,
as distractions from the truths that such leaders are carving out the very foundations
of a healthy society and political culture. They are also depending on our
being overwhelmed with the sheer volume and weight of stories that our memories
will be drowning in “stuff” and we will either forget or ignore their nefarious
obsession with their own power.

Deceit shows itself, and we can hear this story in every coffee
shop and bus stop, and waiting room, in how we have participated in and
permitted a culture of refusal (denial of) to accept responsibility, linked to
the demolition of the notion of shame. To hear someone acknowledge “this is on
me” today is so jarring to our ears that we actually wonder if there might be a
loose “screw” inside the head of such a person. Employers too cover their obsession
with greed and profit in the mascara of crumbs of classical conditioning
rewards, while denying they are increasing the workload of every worker,
without once bringing those workers into the planning and discussion of the
very changes those workers will be expected to carry out.

The notion of corporate team, and the circle organizational model,
once considered a healthy way to build a workplace culture of respect has been
replaced by a regression return to scientific management enabled by the
proliferation of digital technology that can and does measure every piece of
work by the nano-second. Obvious such measurement feeds the insatiable appetite
for “data” from managers, who then seek ways to wring out more work for less
cost from all of the departments in his/her responsibility.

Having secured the virtual etherizing of all labour unions, and the
voices of the workers, in a seemingly compulsive and obsessive march toward “entrepreneurship”
and the engine the drives the economy, the establishment has gutted pensions,
benefits and worker protections and replaced all of the safety net with contract
positions that have no security, no benefits and no RESPECT! Even bringing in “interns”
with the promise of a glowing “line” in your resume, is another deceit, playing
to the exclusive advantage of the power structure. And yet, in order to even
glimpse a potential hire in the future, young grads are compelled to play this
game of corporate deceit.

Affairs, by the president, are now disregarded as to whether they are acceptable in the public
arena and replaced by the details over silence payments in the public media’s coverage
of current events. And even then, those stories are buried in the obfuscations of the administration’s talking
heads, simply because even they have no idea where the truth lies. Such is the drama
of deceit that is playing out before our eyes, under the cloud of a mere
headline “fake news” attributed to formerly legitimate news outlets.

We are enmeshed in a culture of deceit, the foundations of which
are rooted in fear of disclosure, fear of rejection and fear of abandonment shared
by every single person. However, it is the people in positions of
responsibility who have abrogated the design and delivery of the public
messages to their own specific, unique and narcissistic purposes, deceiving
even themselves, because there is no way they can or will remember what lies
they have previously told, when, where, to whom or with what consequences.

As for me and my own family, I deeply and profoundly regret and am
sorry for my own participation in a culture of silence, repression, and fear of
rejection. I enabled such a culture to ensnare others in the perception, which
easily becomes belief, that the truth would be too “hard” for others to handle.
A veneer of “protection” can and does only mask authentic and viable
connections between people, and while I was attempting to remove the masks from
public figures, I was perpetuating my own mask, at the time, probably mostly unconsciously;
now, not so much!

It would do all of us well to spend some time reflecting on the “secrets”
we are currently hiding, in fear of disclosure from the very people we love and
who love us. And such reflection might well ask questions like, “How am I
sabotaging this relationship, and my own person, by burying these often deep and
painful truths under a sand hill of silence, distortion or outright denial.

Such deceit, notwithstanding the warnings from some heavyweight
thinkers, can and will continue to entrap us and so clip our wings from
undergirding our full potential as to deprive us individually, our families and
our workplaces and nations of one of the more powerful and under-accessed and
under-utilized human resources. And we do not need huge rigs or monumental environmental
disasters to mine this energy.

Perhaps, if we all were to find the words, the courage and the
sensitivity to express our full truth, those shibboleths about not being able
to withstand too much truth would fade into the mists of myth and history. And,
perhaps ‘strong men’ could climb down from their vulnerable pedestals,
acknowledge their fragility, and permit and enable the free-flow of human creativity,
energy and real power to take responsibility for our shared lives.

Now there’s a reformation waiting to be “birthed”!

*I have been confronted directly and personally in private by a now
deceased bishop anxious that the people in the church were unable and unwilling
to tolerate too much honesty and truth, in conversation about prospective
entrance into active ministry. I was so shocked and appalled that decades
later, the scene of the conversation remains vivid, coloured, scented and
clouded with the appalling self-protective bubble in which he had encased
himself and his ecclesial leadership.

Another bishop, attempting to rationalize the approach taken
following a church tragedy, applauded the model, spirit and leadership of
Winston Churchill, as precisely what was needed, rather than the obvious choice
of grief counselling. “Strong men” have embedded their image deeply even into
the culture deployed in flawed and futile pastoral care.